“Samson”, a sharp film about freedom within chaos
Identity, the need to belong, the reconstruction of the human being in the face of traumatic events and love as a lifeline run through the plot of “Samson”. It was 2014 when Pável Quevedo Ullauri wrote the first version of the script for this fiction film, which It will be released on May 28 with a powerful reflection on freedom, and that uses prison as a symbol to talk about the different concepts of “prison”.
The play will premiere at a time when Ecuador remains latent one of the bloodiest pages in the history of the prison system, written in last February.
That month, a rivalry between gangs left more than seventy inmates dead and rekindled concerns about the management of the prison system, as well as the present and future of the prisoners, palpable concerns in “Sansón.”
Set in the Historic Center of Quito and at the rhythm of techno-cumbia, “Samson” addresses the conflict between going back to the past or building a new life: How to start over when your life stopped and the world continues? Before starting the work,
Quevedo, 40, met with ex-convicts and lawyers, visited prisons and found that many inmates leave prison worse than they entered: with broken emotions, saturated ideas, few emotional, existential and practices “to take on the real world again,” he shared.
El case of a person who was sentenced to one year in prison, but who was imprisoned for seven years awaiting sentence, as well as other experiences, were feeding the script of a film that, in 90 minutes, speaks of the need to reinvent yourself to survive. And it is that passionate about the issue of freedom, its director not only reflects in the work on this concept from the angle of confinement, but from “its diversity of views.”
For him, freedom is a very intimate feeling of “feeling comfortable with the environment where we live, complete with the people we share. It is being able to have a dignified life, dignified social rights.”
“Getting out of prison is not enough to be free”, sums up the spirit of the film in which the main character, Baldomero, played by the Ecuadorian Wolfram
Sinue, gets out of jail and “realizes that he is not free because he has many traumas saved, he is broken as a human being “, and he must rebuild himself as a person.
The film tells the story of a exboxer (Baldomero) that after spending nine years behind bars, tries reintegrate carrying the ghosts of the past and facing prejudices. The film gives the public the possibility to understand that if the system has not built something that helps on a day-to-day basis, “you have to make that tremendous effort” to get ahead, Sinue declared, highlighting the importance of freeing yourself from your own prisons.
Baldomero is in all these senses the representation of the human being who fights against all adversity so as not to fall into bad steps again, because Sinue considers that “the prison is within one” and that the work to overcome is individual. “Perhaps the prisons are not only there in the penitentiaries, perhaps the prisons are outside,” said the protagonist of “Sansón”, a work that explores the world of prisons, techno-cumbia and reintegration.